Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar today said that putting an enforcement mechanism for various green laws will be a priority of his Ministry in the second year.

Advocating amendments to existing environment laws, Javadekar said that periodic review of laws is needed every 10-15 years as circumstances and technology keep changing.

“Jairam Ramesh, Jayanthi Natarajan and others had created so many laws but they never bothered to create an enforcement mechanism. Now this is our priority for second year.

“There are 6-7 laws by which environment are governed.

There is Environment Protection Act, two Forest Acts, Air Act and Water Act under which pollution regime is created. All these need amendments. It’s a periodic review and needs to be done in 10-15 years for each Act because circumstances and technology changes and the law should be responding to that,” Javadekar said in an interview to NDTV.

Noting that trials for some of the Genetically Modified (GM) crops have been allowed, Javadekar said the government will go ahead with it only if the trials are “safe“.

“Prime Minister Narendra Modi is very clear. We have to produce per drop more crop. You cannot stop science. We will go ahead. Trials will have to be safe.

“There will be safe trials. It is a eight year process. We have already allowed and we will allow if there are really safe trials. Today what we have done is basically used agriculture university fields which are isolated,” he said.

Noting that earlier the Environment Ministry was a “speed breaker and roadblock” ministry, Javadekar said he does not categorize anybody as “good or bad NGO” and there are certain people who have some agenda.

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